The semester is nearly over.

Across my courses and independent studies I've directed this semester, I've had 32 students complete their work for credit, 8 students have received incomplete marks (most of those should be resolved by the end of January), and 4 have received no credit (but I'm open to changing those if the students make extraordinary efforts independently in the next few weeks). I don't like giving so many incomplete grades, but when you teach adult students online, things happen: mental health issues, caregiving issues, family issues, things on the job, legal problems, deployments to the Middle East or Central Asia, and so forth. Most of those incomplete grades were given to people who turned in great assignments and participated well in discussion boards for more than half the semester, but just had big gaps (mostly toward the end of the semester) when they suddenly stopped posting or submitting assignments.

My total teaching load was light (44 students) because I'm the department chair, and have about 10-20 hours of work each week just in administrative duties and service on various committees. I'm chair of a department with about 220 students (mixed graduate and undergraduate, online and on ground), but only three faculty.

During break I will prepare the online lectures for my new course on struggles for liberty and freedom. I'm taking a community organizing and social work perspective on various social movements, revolutions, rebellions, and political causes in which freedom or liberty were expressed motivating factors. We begin with national revolts against imperial rule (from The Maccabee Revolt, Servile Wars, and Provinces rebelling against Roman Imperial Rule down through the American and French Revolutions, the struggles of 1848, and the emancipation, suffrage, and civil rights movements, to modern rhetoric around freedom and liberty in the Tea Party Movement, and various forms of resistance to tyranny political (China, Cuba, Iran, etc.) economic (anti-globalization movement, resistance to corporate power), and social (movements to empower and liberate persons with disabilities, and the resistance to oppressive language and the anti-political-correctness backlash). My goal is to get about 17 lectures down and recorded for iTunes U. I've got to have this done by the first week of June, so I'll be using most of my "vacation" time to get it done.

- Eric

Reasonable service and scholarship expectations at a teaching-oriented college

Recently some faculty and administrators in my college were considering what sort of expectations we have for clinical instructors, in terms of their teaching, scholarship, and service. This inspired me to consider how much hours it takes to teach well, and what time this leaves us for committee meetings, service to the college and department and community, advising, research, keeping up-to-date in our fields of expertise, and so forth. I’d like to share my calculations here.

First of all, let’s model an ideal situation, where faculty work a reasonable number of hours per week. I think 44 hours per week is a reasonable workload, and in a 44 hour work week for university faculty, I would suppose about 8 hours of labor are actually spent at lunch, breaks, walking around campus to get to meetings, and various other activities that don’t really contribute to teaching, service, or scholarship. So, a typical faculty in this ideal state would about 36 hours of productive working time per week in a semester in which to do what they are paid to do.

And how long is a semester? Well, faculty probably work on their courses and administrative duties a couple weeks before classes start, and then classes go on for about 15 weeks, and then there is the week of final exams, and the week after final exams when faculty are grading those exams or final papers and so forth, so that’s 19 weeks of work. Usually there is a week of vacation in there somewhere, either spring break or the Thanksgiving break, but in this ideal scenario we’re just ignoring that in the hopes that in this ideal world the faculty get a week of vacation in there. That gives a typical faculty member about 684 hours to labor in a typical semester, at least in this model in which they are working a reasonable work week.

During the 15 weeks of courses, faculty must show up for classes, and that usually involves 2-4 hours of time per class each week (for simplicity’s sake, we’ll say 3 hours). Each week a faculty member teaching three courses must be present with the classes of students for about 9 hours. This time is the same whether a class has four students or 84 students.

Then there is a flexible amount of time a faculty member can devote to preparing for each class session or preparing for their class before the semester begins. They can design and prepare exercises, simulations, lab assignments, lecture notes, and so forth. They can update everything. They can make new tests, new discussion questions, and choose new readings. They must design a syllabus, and they must prepare assignment descriptions or tests. There is a minimum threshold to all this work, and there is probably a maximum number beyond which additional hours of labor get someone no discernible improvements in the quality of instruction.

Another significant variable shaping the need for this sort of labor is the experience of the faculty in teaching the course. If it is the faculty’s first time teaching the course, and the faculty is new, and the course is in an area the faculty knows about, but it’s not the faculty’s specialty, then preparation time can be immense, easily 10 hours per week just to do a reasonable job. If the faculty has taught the course a few times before, and the course is directly related to the faculty’s special interests and expertise, then class preparation times are drastically reduced, and one can probably do an excellent job with just 2-3 hours of preparation per week of classes. Typically there is more time devoted to this class preparation in the two weeks preceding the start of classes, and then a fairly constant amount of time throughout the weeks of classes, and then almost no time devoted to it in the weeks following classes, so all in all, the average over the 19 weeks of work in a semester is probably close to the average spent in a typical week. This is a number of labor hours that is also fairly constant and independent of class sizes. In fact, preparing lectures and group exercises and discussion questions for a class of 55 may require less time than the more detailed preparation one might need to do for a more intimate and personal class of 15.

Then there is the time devoted to evaluating student work and giving students individual attention, mainly through writing comments on their papers or lab work, but also in grading tests, answering questions or e-mails related to class during office hours, and so forth. On one extreme, a faculty member can give almost no feedback and use only multiple-choice tests. On the other extreme, a faculty can give copious feedback on writing style, reasoning, critical thinking, sources, grammar, and so forth. The minimum requirement that leads to almost no feedback aside from submission of grades at the end of the semester probably averages out over 19 weeks to about 5 minutes per student in class per week (slightly over 90 minutes per student per semester). If one gives five assignments and a few tests and gives copious helpful feedback on each assignment, assigns a great amount of writing and actually carefully reads all the writing and comments on a fair portion of it, then one could easily devote 12 hours per student per class per semester, averaging nearly an hour per week per student during the 15 weeks of classes (although not spread evenly across the 15 weeks of classes, but rather concentrated in weeks following submission of assignments).

So, here are my hour estimates for the time required to teach three courses with 18 students in each course over a semester, at a minimal level, a high level, and the highest level that still makes sense, using 1.5, 8, and 13 hours per student per semester as the times faculty would devote to student feedback; 2 hours, 5 hours, and 10 hours as the time faculty would devote to class preparation on average per week; and 3 hours per week for actual in-class time for each course during the 15 weeks of the semester for all three scenarios:

Time in a semester per course:

Average reasonable time for an experienced faculty member giving high quality feedback: 280.

Time for a newer faculty teaching some new courses and giving outstanding help to students in the class: 460 hours.

Time for an experienced faculty member doing a minimal effort with minimal feedback to students: 110 hours.

In actual practice, I think something like 200-250 hours per course is the actual labor time for teaching at a level of excellence with some degree of efficiency after you’ve had two or three years of experience as a professor. However, most faculty teach at a level of high quality (very good work) rather than a level of outstanding excellence, so most faculty get by with some sort of effort around 170-200 hours in a semester per class they teach, assuming the class sizes are around 18-20 students.

What is the amount of time this leaves faculty for their research, their scholarly work, their attending meetings of their department or college, their service to various governance committees and other sorts of clubs or committees on campus? What about their time meeting with their advisees, or the time they spend talking to prospective students or alumni? What if they must travel for a three-day trip to a conference where they present a paper and attend many hours of sessions? What if they are volunteering in the community or in a scholarly association, and helping to serve on an advisory board, or organize a conference, or do accreditation site visits? What about the memos they must write, the schedules and book requests they must submit? What about service on search committees, hosting potential colleagues to campus visits or reviewing scores of files of job applicants? What about training sessions? What about the 40-60 e-mails they receive each day? What about showing support for students by attending student events? Anyway, if a faculty member is spending 200 hours per course per semester, this leaves about 84 hours per semester for all the research and service. If a faculty member is spending 170 hours per course, they will have about the same number of hours per semester (174 hours) to do all their scholarly and service and administrative work.

Now, how many hours are faculty expected to devote to service, and how many hours are required to produce high quality scholarship? Assuming a professor puts 510 hours into teaching three courses with 54 students across the three courses over the semester, and then divides their time with 90 hours in scholarship and 84 hours in service, that gives them about 4 hours and 45 minutes each week for scholarship and 4 hours and 25 minutes each week for service and administration.

Conclusions:

1). If a faculty is expected to teach 4 courses per semester rather than 3 (as clinical instructors may be asked to do), there will be no significant time left for scholarship or service. Faculty teaching 4 courses per semester should have no expectations for service or scholarship.

2). If class sizes increase from 18 to 25, average hours devoted to feedback to each student will decrease (assuming hours allocated to scholarship and service remain constant). If a faculty member devotes 3-4 hours to individualized attention and feedback for each student (in reading and critiquing assignments and so forth) over the course of a whole semester, can this give the student an equally high quality education as when faculty devote 6-8 hours per semester to each student? We are assuming here that class preparation hours from the faculty and actual class time are held constant, and we’re just reducing individualized instruction and feedback. Is that individualized feedback and evaluation so important that a reduction of two or three hours per student in the time faculty give to individualized attention (over the course of a whole semester) going to harm students? I think it will.

3) Taxpayers who help fund universities should insist that public universities organize their spending and administrative structures in such a way that average class sizes remain at or below 20 students per class. A change in average class sizes from the 15-20 range up to the 20-25 range probably diminishes the quality of education in colleges that are not highly selective (students at highly selective schools probably need less individualized time from their instructors). Certainly a rise from the 15-20 class size range to the 25-30 students per class will greatly diminish individualized feedback from faculty. Faculty will need to compensate by training students to give peer feedback and using peer feedback to supplement the greatly reduced faculty feedback.

But still, faculty and the taxpaying public should fight to keep class sizes smaller. Universities ought to spend more than 50% of all revenue gained from tuition payments and allocations from unrestricted state funding to the costs of direct student advising and teaching (and library services). Efficiency gains in the structure of universities and allocation of money toward direct provision of services should be a high priority, and take precedence over attempts to squeeze greater “teaching efficiency” from faculty. Teaching 25 students rather that 15 students per class is not necessarily more efficient in terms of actual learning gained by the students in a classroom. That is, economic efficiency is not the same as pedagogical efficiency. Given the constraints of reasonable workloads and working hours and the need for quality scholarship and service, and given the actual numbers of hours needed for class preparation and individualized feedback, maximum efficiencies in teaching are probably obtained in class sizes of 15-20. Average class sizes of 20 are sustainable if public subsidy of teaching costs are set at close to 50% and average tuition costs actually paid for a year of public university education are set at about 20% of median year-round full-time income and faculty earn incomes at close to the median year-round full-time income for college-educated males, provided that over half of tuition and unrestricted state subsidies go to direct instructional and advising and library costs, and administrative and support costs are kept at less than 50%.

3). If quality scholarship requires more than 4-5 hours of work per week over a semester, and faculty are expected to have a reasonable work week of about 44 hours, then faculty will need to reduce time devoted to courses or to service and administration. Universities should be careful not to lay administrative burdens on faculty that would likely exceed an average of 4-5 hours per week. If university governance requires that some faculty give significantly more than 5 hours per week to departmental service or university service, then a system should be created to allow those faculty to teach fewer courses or smaller courses.

Books our students thought worth mentioning

I've had a busy semester. No posts on the blog in March and April. That's pretty bad. Anyway, I'm going through the final end-of-semester papers from seniors in my senior seminar, and I've been noticing the books these students reference. They must write a paper describing all the courses they took and what they learned in their undergraduate education, and some of them have listed books they found memorable or influential. I'll share a list of some of these sources I've pulled from the student reference lists. These are some of the books students in our program have encountered in recent years.

Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition: An Anthology (Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies). (2003). New York, NY: Wiley.

Aslan Reza. No God but God. The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam. New York New York: Random House, 2006.

Barnes, Susan. Computer-Mediated Communication. Boston: Pearson Education, 2003.

Bean, Thomas, et al. Content Area Literacy. Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 2008.

Boddice, R. (2009). A History of Attitudes and Behaviours Toward Animals in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century Britain: Anthropocentrism and the Emergence of Animals. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press.

Boyer, Ernest L. College, The Undergraduate Experience in America. First ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.

Cherlin, A. J. (2009). Public and Private Families: A Reader (6th Revised edition ed.). New York: Mcgraw Hill Higher Education.

Davis, M., Eshelman, R., and McKay, M. (2000) The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook, (5th Ed.) New York: MJF Books.

Droegkamp, Jan. Liberal Studies Handbook. Springfield, IL: University of Illinois, 2004.

Eiseley, Loren C. The Star Thrower. First ed. New York: Random House, 1978.

Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Feldman, Noah. Divided by God. New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

Fisher & Harrsison. Substance Abuse Information for School Counselors, Social Workers, Therapists, and Counselors. 4th Edition. Allyn Ed and Bacon Press.

Fisher, Louis & Adler, David Gray. American Constitutional Law, Seventh Edition. Durham NC: Carlina Academic Press, 2007.

Frye, Marilyn. “Oppression.” From The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Turnsburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1983.

Gronlund, N.E. (2004) 7th Edition Writing Instructional Objectives for Teaching and Assessment. Paperback. Pearson.

Holy Bible, New Living Translation. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1996.

Homer. The Odyssey, translated by S.H. Butcher and A. Lang. Vol. XXII. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001.

Hooke, Alexander E. Virtuous Persons, Vicious Deeds. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1999.

Indian Tales and Others by Neihardt, John G.. (1936). New York: Macmillan Company.

Jolly, Alison. Lucy's legacy : sex and intelligence in human evolution. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. : 1999

Kellenberger, James. Introduction to Philosophy of Religion. First ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007.

Kellough, R.D. and Jarolimet, W. (2007) Teaching and Learning in the Elementary School, 9th Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall

Kellough, Richard, and Jioanna Carjuzaa. Teaching in the Middle and Secondary Schools. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2006.

Kidd, Thomas S. American Christians and Islam. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

King, T. (2006). Medicine River. Boston: Penguin (Non-Classics).

King, T. (2008). The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Indigenous Americas) (1 ed.). Minnesota: Univ Of Minnesota Press.

Kingston Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York New York: Vintage Books, 1975.

Kolb, David A. The Kolb Learning Style Inventory. Hay Group, 1999.

Komives, Susan R., Nance Lucas, and Timothy R. McMahon. Exploring Leadership. Second ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.

Kymlicka, Will. Contemporary Political Philosophy, Second Edition. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Lenski, S.D. and Nierthermer, S.L. (2004) Becoming a Teacher of Reading: A Developmental Approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc.

Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House."

Macionis, J. J. (2007). Sociology (12th Edition) (MySocLab Series) (12 ed.). Alexandria, VA: Prentice Hall.

Macionis, J. J. (2009). Social Problems (4th Edition) (4 ed.). Alexandria, VA: Prentice Hall.

Marlowe, J.D., and Cummins, S. (2008) Evidence for Paralegals (4th Edition) Aspen.

McGinniss Joe. The $elling of the President. The Classic Account of The Packaging of a Candidate. New York New York: Penguin Books, 1969.

McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege and Male Privilege."

Mcluhan, M. (1997). Essential McLuhan. New York: Routledge.

Millman, Richard, and George Parker. Geometry. New York: Springer, 1991.

Momaday, N. S. (1990). The Way to Rainy Mountain (9th Paperbound Printing ed.). Albuquerque, CA: University Of New Mexico.

Momaday, N. S. (2010). House Made of Dawn (P.S.). New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

Moore, B. N. (2010). Philosophy: The Power of Ideas (8 ed.). Boston: Mcgraw-Hill College.

Morgan, Robin. Case Studies in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1999.

Myers, Dee Dee. Why Women Should Rule The World. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

Neihardt, J. G. (1991). When the Tree Flowered: The Story of Eagle Voice, a Sioux Indian (New Edition) (New ed.). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Neihardt, J. G. (1998). The Giving Earth: A John G. Neihardt Reader. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Neihardt, J. G. (2002). A Cycle of the West: The Song of Three Friends, The Song of Hugh Glass, The Song of Jed Smith, The Song of the Indian Wars, The Song of the Messiah (50 Anv ed.). Toronto, Canada: Bison Books.

Nerburn, Kent. Letters to My Son. Novato, CA: New World Library, 1999.

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State and Utopia. Basic Books Inc. 1974.

Pence, G. (2007). Medical Ethics: Accounts of the Cases that Shaped and Define Medical Ethics (5 ed.). New York City: McGraw-Hill.

Platt, R. (2006). Crime Scene: The Ultimate Guide to Forensic Science. New York: DK ADULT.

Platt, R. (2008). Forensics (Kingfisher Knowledge). New York: Kingfisher.

Pojman, Louis P., and Michael Rea. Philosophy of Religion. Fifth ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson & Wadsworth, 2008.

Posner, George. Field Experience - A Guide to Reflective Teaching. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2010.

Possin, Kevin. Critical Thinking. Winona, MN: The Critical Thinking Lab, 2002.

Powell, Sara Davis. Introduction to Middle School. New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2005.

Rachels, J. (1991). Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford Paperbacks). New York: Oxford University Press, USA.

Rachels, J., & Rachels, S. (2009). The Elements of Moral Philosophy (6th Revised edition ed.). New York: Mcgraw Hill Higher Education.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1979, 1999.

Reynard Charles, Valente Judith. Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2006.

Sax, B. (1992). The Parliament of Animals: Anecdotes and Legends from Books of Natural History, 1775-1900. Fairfax: University Publishing Association.

Sax, B. (2002). Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Sax, B. (2004). Crow (Reaktion Books - Animal). New York: Reaktion Books.

Shedletsky, Leonard, and Joan Aitken. Human Communication on the Internet. Boston: Pearson Education, 2004.

Stevenson, L. (1988). Seven Theories of Human Nature (2 ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, USA.

Tannen, Deborah. “Wears Jumpsuit. Sensible Shoes. Uses Husband’s Last Name.” in The Meaning of Difference. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

Taulbert, Clifton. Eight Habits of the Heart. First ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Thio, A. (2009). Deviant Behavior (10th Edition) (10 ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Waldman, Steven. Founding Faith. How Our Founding Fathers Forged a Radical New Approach to Religious Liberty. New York New York: Random House, 2008.

Walzer Michael. Spheres of Justice. A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. Basic Books Inc. 1983.

Wharton, A. S. (2005). Working in America: Continuity, Conflict, and Change (3 ed.). New York City: McGraw-Hill.

Wren, J. Thomas. The Leader's Companion. First ed. New York: The Free Press, 1995.

Wright, Robert, The moral animal : the new science of evolutionary psychology. Pantheon Books, New York : 1994.

Photographs of friends

I was looking for some old documents to photocopy last night, when I discovered my old middle school yearbooks. I scanned some of the pictures from the yearbooks and uploaded the images to my Facebook photo albums. And then, for a while, I reflected on friendship.

Here is one of the images from my 8th grade yearbook. In it I'm in the upper left, holding the French Horn (which I still have). There are a couple students in this photograph who had classes with me all the way from kindergarten through eighth grade, but I moved away from Indianapolis in 1982 and lost contact with most of these people in the 1990s. Now, through the Internet, I've reconnected with several of the old friends in this photograph, including Amy Wharton (Amy Shirk, front row far left), Andy Hamaker (front row on the right), Rob Deppert (front row on the right holding the trumpet), Angela Brown (Angela McCormack, behind Andy Hamaker and Rob Deppert), and John Dishinger (in the third row, on the left, wearing tinted glasses).
I wonder if, thanks to the Internet, my own sons will keep up continuously with their childhood friends all through their lives without the 20-year-gap I've had. That could be a good thing. Keeping in touch, even at a distance, makes it easier to occasionally get together for more supportive or fun activities. I find that what I liked (or even loved) about these old friends when we were children and teenagers still is present in who they are now. Rob Deppert and I are still passionate about politics, usually fairly leftist; Andy Hamaker is still involved in music, etc.

This particular photograph is one of the first ones taken of me without glasses after I started wearing glasses in 1976. I decided to switch to contact lenses partly because I preferred how I looked without glasses, as in this photograph. (There were also issues with active sports, playing in the snow or rain, etc.). These days I wear contacts and glasses almost equally. I have had some trouble with the contact lenses while commuting to work on my bike, so I'm more likely to wear glasses while riding.



The second photograph here shows me with my friends Dave Sutcliffe and Dave Wicker at the Johnston Center Renewal in Redlands California, during this past February President's Day weekend. Dave Wicker and I were roommates in our freshmen year (1986-87) at the Johnston Center. That year there were several Erics and Daves living in Bekins Hall.






The third photograph is a recent one of me with some friends. In this case I'm with a few of my graduate students, although Michael Kim had just finished presenting his master's thesis, so he was celebrating becoming a UIS alumni at this particular outing. Amy, the young woman on the left, is finishing up her master's degree with a focus on cross-cultural communication through the arts, with a special emphasis on documentary film and photography. She teaches at Robert Morris College. The woman next to her in the white shirt is Stephanie, and her master's degree focus is in environmental stewardship, with a focus on writing about environmental issues for Christian audiences. Michael Kim is the Korean-American doctor (he is a surgeon) next to me. His master's degree had a focus in surgical education. I'm the guy on the far right.

Human Nature

Well, I'm done with three of my four courses from the Fall semester, and by tomorrow I'll be done with the fourth one. I've had very little time for anything else these past ten days.  

In my human nature course I made a page to share my students’ work. If you want to read their papers or see their work, check out this human nature web page. 

Quotations about Human Nature

I've been giving my students in my human nature courses an assignment to find good aphorisms and quotations that offer deep insight into human nature. If you're curious about what these persons have found and shared, I've uploaded their collections to some web pages I'm willing to share.

Here are some quotations gathered by students in this semester's course.

Here are some older collections of quotations from the summer of 2007, and here are even older ones from the spring of 2007.

If you look over these you can see how some students find quotations from the readings I've suggested or forced them to read in my course, while others mainly find quotations by going to websites that specialize in providing quotations on whatever topic you suggest. Some students diligently give good citations and a personal interpretation for each quotations, while others just throw out quotations with barely any citation and no personal commentary. If you look past that to the quotations they have selected, there are some really beautiful and thought-provoking gems of insight among the aphorisms and quotations collected here.

Biking to work

Once or twice each week I bike from home to work and back. It's a little over seven miles each way, and I usually require about 45 minutes between office and home. It's an easy ride, but the prairie winds can slow you down. Last night as I rode home around 6:00 p.m the sun was coming out to shine on the land just before it set. We hadn't seen the sun around here for a few days.

There is a bike trail (really just an extra wide shoulder along a road) from campus to a point about 300 meters from busy 6th street, and for most of the last 300 meters I can ride on a sidewalk. After crossing 6th, there is a little over a mile of riding on a frontage outer road on the south side of an interstate freeway. There is no shoulder at all on this outer road, so cars tend to hesitate to pass. In the morning coming to school there are large trucks going to and from the construction of the new overpass and MacArthur road extension, and these trucks drive slowly past.

Once I get to the construction site I can turn north (going home) and take a recreational bike trail for about a mile up to Jerome, a small town on the south side of Springfield. There in Jerome I get to cross Wabash, a road that is even busier than 6th street. From there on home I ride through the quiet residential streets of Jerome, taking a horribly bumpy bike path across Sebastian's middle school's athletic field and parking lot before getting into my neighborhood on the south side of Springfield.

As I said, the sun was looking nice peaking out from low above the horizon last night, and I had my camera with me, so I took these photos I thought I'd share here. I didn't take photos before I got to the recreational bike trail. Up to that point I tend to be intent on avoiding traffic and taking photographs wouldn't occur to me.

Autumn Colors

I thought we had fairly good color in the leaves this autumn.  We had no hard frosts or freezes until November, although we had one mild frost in October.  There were many warm days.  

Here you can see a couple views from our front porch down Park Avenue, looking north.  There are also some photos of the red maples at my university, the University of Illinois at Springfield.

Fundamentally Inconsistent With Whose Values?

In this post I'm going to explain some strange connections among various conservative views of the university, and especially views of social work education.

Back in November of 2007 I heard about a new think tank being formed at our sister campus (University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign). This is the Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government Fund. Odd that "fund" was part of its name, but go to the website and see for yourself what this center does.

Now, I received both my master's degree and my doctorate at Washington University, and I remember there were certain institutes or research centers there where conservative ideologies were strongly supported. There were a variety of think-tanks or centers such as the International Society for New Institutional Economics, the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, the Center for the Study of American Business (now named after Weidenbaum, a great scholar, rather than some wealthy benefactor), and various other places on campus where scholars were researching the free enterprise system. I remember conservative intellectuals like professor Murray Weidenbaum were very available to give talks or meet with students, and there were some fun, friendly debates between social work faculty and people from the Olin Business School or the Economics Department. I'd sometimes use papers, or at least read them, that I could pick up in the various conservative centers, and for the most part the materials were straight-forward scholarship pieces. So, I was surprised to hear that the Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government was going to fund studies that set out to prove certain ideological propositions.

Specifically, the Academy was going to fund research into areas such as:

1) The relationship between economic growth and reduced government size.

2) Free market capitalism can become more effective in providing opportunities and prosperity for individual nations.

3) Why communism, socialism, government bureaucracy have failed to bring prosperity, and how capitalism brings material wealth to a broad spectrum of society.

These are all interesting questions, and as propositions they could lead to some very fruitful studies and discussions.

Anent the first point, there are limits to how large the public sector of an economy may be before the economy starts to slow down. At some point, perhaps when taxing and spending approach 50% or 60% of GNP, there tends to be slow-downs in economic growth and wealth creation. Certainly a society in which 80% of economic activity was cycled through public revenue collection and spending would be less economically dynamic than one in which 40% of the economy was in the public sector. On the other hand, a society in which too little of the economy was cycled through the public sector would also have problems. If the public, through public sector taxing and spending, has fewer than 20%, or even 30% of the economy under its control, public goods are likely to be neglected, and the overall public welfare is likely to decline steeply, especially during downturns in business cycles. Studies to find out approximately where the upper and lower bounds of public sector spending are for efficient national economies would be welcome, but where is the intellectual honesty in funding research that only seeks to prove that smaller public sectors enhance economic growth?

The second point seems uncontroversial. Any studies to determine how any technology or system (e.g., free market capitalism) can do a better job of meeting human needs should be encouraged. In what circumstances and under what rules does the free market capitalist system do the best job of satisfying human needs? We might look to the capitalism practiced in Scandinavia for an answer.

The third point is the most controversial. Government bureaucracy and socialism are more about controlling and sharing prosperity, rather than creating it, so I’m not sure I see the point of researching how it’s fair to say they have “failed” to bring prosperity. Actually, I think socialism and bureaucracy have done good job of sharing and stabilizing the prosperity brought by free markets in some situations (Kerela in India, Scandinavia, Western Europe, the United States). Government programs and socialistic policies sometimes do create prosperity. Not often, but often enough to make them viable choices in certain circumstances. I'm thinking here of the G.I. bill, the construction of interstate highways, the Tennessee Valley Authority, many of the New Deal programs of the American government of the 1930s, and so forth. I think our Social Security policies are fairly socialistic, and certainly they are based on government bureaucracy, but they do a fine job of keeping most elderly in America out of poverty and in relatively prosperous circumstances. Certainly this is better (in terms of prosperity) than the system of county poor farms and poor houses we had before Social Security was introduced.

Anyway, I wanted to learn more about the Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government Fund, so at their website I looked at the Board of the Directors and Advisory Council. I noticed Anne D. Neal of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, listed on the advisory council. Anne Neal has her name on the rather curious screed called, "How Many Ward Churchills?" In it, she accuses professors of asking their students to think critically about the status quo, and seems horrified that universities tend to urge their students to find problems with the status quo and think of how reforms or changes might improve things. I've taught community organizing, and my courses often have sections on diversity, so I was surprised to see in this report the accusation that,“In classroom after classroom, on campus after campus, courses too often look more like lessons in political advocacy and sensitivity training than objective and balanced presentations of scholarly research.” I had no idea so many of my colleagues were teaching advocacy and organizing skills. Certainly my students have not been demonstrating this. Actually, in my courses I have my students cover the scholarly research on political advocacy and sensitivity training. Surely there is no point in teaching political advocacy skills and techniques unless you can document through empirical studies that what you suggest your students do is likely to effect the results they want.

The person who is listed first of the Board of Directors of the Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government Fund is Stephen H. Balch. He is the president of the National Association of Scholars. During the fall semester (of 2007), the home page of the National Association of Scholars had this interesting article, right on the first page of their website:

Collateral Damage in Social Work’s March Toward Ideological Purity

The release of NAS’s report, The Scandal of Social Work Education, has prompted follow-up reporting in the press and some reflection by a former student.

George Will devoted his 14 October 2007 column to the report, noting that, “In the month since the NAS released its study, none of the schools covered by it has contested its findings.”

Bruce Rushton, a reporter for The State Journal-Register (Springfield, Illinois) followed up on a local angle. The NAS report cites what happened to Sandra Fuiten, who dropped out of the social work program at the University of Illinois at Springfield when required by a professor to lobby state legislators on behalf of causes to which she had moral objections. One professor told her that it was impossible for her to be both a social worker and an opponent of abortion. Rushton picked up the story from Will and tracked down Sandra Fuiten, who stood by her account. As Rushton explains, Fuiten is now deep in debt, ill, and living on disability.

You can follow a link from this article to George Will's opinion piece. In it, he writes:

The NAS study also reports that Sandra Fuiten abandoned her pursuit of a social work degree at the University of Illinois, Springfield, after the professor, in a course that required students to lobby the Legislature on behalf of positions prescribed by the professor, told her that it is impossible to be both a social worker and an opponent of abortion.

I was also able to find Brush Rushton's article at the Gatehouse News Service, where he writes:

In the article, Fuiten wrote that she dropped out of UIS in 2001 after a professor told her that she could not be a social worker and also oppose abortion.

The professor could not be reached for comment.

Fuiten said Friday she remembers the conversation distinctly.

“Somehow the topic of abortion got brought up,” Fuiten said. “She looked me in the eye and said ‘You can’t be a social worker.’ I said ‘Why?’ ‘Because you’re against abortion.’

“’I said ‘Have you ever heard of Catholic Charities, lady?’”

Fuiten said she dropped the class rather than lobby the legislature on behalf of the National Association of Social Workers, a target of NAS. The professor is a member of the organization.

“I was not going to lobby for her,” Fuiten said. “It (made me so mad) I dropped my other classes. If it wasn’t for her, I’d be done with my social-work degree.”

I cannot discuss Fuiten's case. She is protected by laws that forbid her professors from discussing her performance at our university, and I was never even her professor, and I’ve never met her. But, I am close friends with her professor. This is the same professor who allegedly told Sandra, “you can't be a social worker. . . because you're against abortion.” This is the same professor who allegedly forced her students to lobby on behalf of the National Association of Social Workers as a class project.

Fuiten demonstrates something of her communication style and approach to life in her writings, posted on the web. She called my friend, her professor, Sandra Mills, "a melay-mouthed LIAR" (I think she meant “mealy-mouthed”) on a blog that has since been taking down. She spells "mealy-mouthed" correctly at the comments section of the Indianapolis Star where Fuiten describes the UIS as "liberalistic pigs who think they can run off their mouths. . . " She wrote a brief article about her experience for campus report online as well.

Well, I don't know what Sandy Mills told Sandra Fuiten back in 2001. I know some things about Sandy Mills, however, that make me wonder how accurate Sandra Fuiten's memories of the events are. Sandy Mills grew up Catholic, worked for Catholic Charities, and adopted her son through a Catholic adoption agency in Milwaukee. She was for a time associated with the Baha'i Faith (as I am), and is now most at home in the Unitarian community here in Springfield. The open-minded and tolerant teachings of Sandy's Baha'i and Unitarian background make me wonder if she is capable of so bluntly forcing students to do assignments that violate their conscience or values. Her background in the Catholic Church also make me wonder how militantly she could support abortion rights. Would she encourage a student to leave the profession because of that student's beliefs about abortion? It seems implausible to me. Sandy routinely places students at Catholic Charities here in Illinois.

George Will, the National Association of Scholars, and various persons associated with the Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government Fund have voiced their opposition to the sort of “indoctrination” we use in social work education (I teach some social work courses, and I consider myself a social work educator and researcher). I wonder if they really understand the social work code of ethics.

I can well imagine what Sandy Mills, or any social work educator, might say to a student that could be misinterpreted by the student as meaning, "if you believe that, you can't be a social worker."

The social work code of ethics tells us that, “Social workers treat each person in a caring and respectful fashion, mindful of individual differences and cultural and ethnic diversity. Social workers promote clients’ socially responsible self-determination. Social workers seek to enhance clients’ capacity and opportunity to change and to address their own needs.” The section of the ethics statement that deals with social workers’ ethical responsibilities to clients, in the “self-determination” sub-section, says, “Social workers respect and promote the right of clients to self-determination and assist clients in their efforts to identify and clarify their goals. Social workers may limit clients’ right to self-determination when, in the social workers’ professional judgment, clients’ actions or potential actions pose a serious, foreseeable, and imminent risk to themselves or others.” In practice, what this means is that social workers must not impose their values or culture on their clients. So, if you oppose abortion, and your client wants an abortion, you’re not supposed to bring up your personal values and try to prevent your client from acting on their values. Certainly it would be good practice to ask a client questions to make certain they understand their own values and have made a conscious choice based on their ethical views, but the aim of this must be to help the client clarify their goals, not as an attempt for the social worker to introduce their values or goals as worthy of the client's consideration.

So, social work educators often tell their students that social workers must not impose their values on their clients. I can well imagine a social work educator telling a student, “if you feel everyone must think as you do, and you feel so strongly that homosexuality is wrong, or abortion is wrong, that you would interfere with your clients to try to make them change their values or decisions to reflect your ethics rather than living according to their own ethics, then you should consider pastoral counseling as your field, rather than social work. In social work, we value the self-determination of our clients, and we don't try to persuade clients to live according to the values that we personally hold.” That would be a fair thing to say. Of course there are some values that social workers will impose on clients. We think it’s wrong to discipline children by striking them with objects to such a degree that marks such as bruises or scars are left, or bones are broken. When we have clients who believe in this sort of discipline, we don’t respect that difference. We also don’t respect client values if the clients believe in the necessity of conducting human sacrifice, or practicing incest, or subjecting ethnic or racial minorities to violent oppression. For some social workers, the fact that clients might choose a homosexual identity or have abortions may be in the same level of ethical wrongness as the examples I’ve given above, of murderous, incestuous, or physically abusive behaviors. For social workers who feel that strongly about these things, it’s worth asking them to consider whether social work is really right for them. Can they still respect client autonomy and self-determination? Can they avoid a particular sort of client?

I personally think it’s okay for a social worker to have one certain type of client they won't work with. Many social workers don’t want to work with wife-beaters, or incest perpetrators. Some want to avoid any clients with borderline personality disorder diagnoses, or anti-social personality diagnoses. I see nothing wrong with a social worker saying that the one sort of client they won’t work with is the homosexual client. In my view, such a person can still be a good social worker. But, other social work faculty disagree with me, and a student would find diverse opinions about this in most schools of social work. It’s a point worth discussing. Would it be okay for a social worker to only work with Christian clients? Only work with African-American clients, European-American clients? Why or why not? Asking questions like this in a social work classroom is hardly indoctrination, is it?

This key value of client autonomy ought to be one that political conservatives such as George Will would appreciate. I think conservatives should laud my friend Sandy Mills for telling her students that they must not impose their values on their clients. Social workers are often working for the government (usually the state government), and as authority figures representing the public, I think conservatives would agree that we don't want them telling clients what is right and wrong based upon their personal religious beliefs.

The most controversial part of social work education and the socal work code of ethics is probably section six, where we have our social and political action statement (section six, sub-section 04). I find the language to be unobjectionable and compatible with most mainstream views of politics. Persons with radical politics would probably feel more comfortable with this section of the code of ethics than those with radically conservative or libertarian views. In fact, in paragraph (d) one could interpret the code of ethics to be opposed to the idea of affirmative action. Here is the code, copied from the NASW website. See what you think:

6.04 Social and Political Action

(a) Social workers should engage in social and political action that seeks to ensure that all people have equal access to the resources, employment, services, and opportunities they require to meet their basic human needs and to develop fully. Social workers should be aware of the impact of the political arena on practice and should advocate for changes in policy and legislation to improve social conditions in order to meet basic human needs and promote social justice.

(b) Social workers should act to expand choice and opportunity for all people, with special regard for vulnerable, disadvantaged, oppressed, and exploited people and groups.

(c) Social workers should promote conditions that encourage respect for cultural and social diversity within the United States and globally. Social workers should promote policies and practices that demonstrate respect for difference, support the expansion of cultural knowledge and resources, advocate for programs and institutions that demonstrate cultural competence, and promote policies that safeguard the rights of and confirm equity and social justice for all people.

(d) Social workers should act to prevent and eliminate domination of, exploitation of, and discrimination against any person, group, or class on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, color, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, political belief, religion, or mental or physical disability.

Hey, it's working again.

Well, I had tried to post to this blog several times in late December and January and "Blotspot" (Blogspot) kept forgetting my password and username. It was strange, and then the semester began, and I didn't have time to post here.

It's nice to see this is up and running. I'll need to start posting here.

One thing I've learned this past semester, never teach three on-line courses in one semester. They are far too time-consuming.

December 20

Yesterday was a fairly slow day. It was too cold. I think it was -15 C when I woke up.

Went to the office to try finishing up grading student papers. There are still a few in my on-line course who haven't turned anything in for the final assignment. I'm waiting.

Went to a party for some friends from the Philosophy Department. Met Gary and Karen, Nathalie, and Eve (Peter's wife), as well as John from the philosophy department. It was a good scene and I was enjoying myself, but after only 30 minutes I had to come home and take the family to the Cub Scout pack meeting. Arthur carried the pack flag in, which is a big honor for a Tiger Cub Scout. The pack meeting was fun.

Last night I wrote a long post to Talisman9, a newgroup listserve I read regularly.

Today (the 20th) I'm helping clean up the house and prepare some gifts. While sorting photographs I came across some good pictures of old friends. There was a nice image of Henry Lee, a high school friend who died of brain cancer who died about six years ago. The photograph was taken at my sister Jennell's high school graduation. I'm glad Henry's family keeps in touch with us.

I'll spend the afternoon in the office finishing up some loose ends from the Fall semester (I hope the students have turned in their final assignments), and get to work on the courses I'm teaching next semester. I also must remember to buy a car battery. I've given up on maintaining my older car (a 1988 Honda Accord with 163,xxx miles), as it would cost thousands to make it nice and I'd rather just save for a different car. My grandfather's car (1995 Honda Accord), however, get's good care (over $1000 worth of good care this month!) We've had it since 2000, when my grandparents died. Anyway, if I don't get a new battery for it soon, one of these mornings I won't be able to start it.